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Saturday, 4 January 2014

The better photo project

Over on Love all blogs the project for the year is the better photo project - and I've decided, for the sake of people looking at the crappy pictures on my blog, to join in and get better at photos! This week the prompt was 'natural light'. This is something we struggle with in our new house. The front of the house faces south - and the only windows there are the kitchen and our bedroom. Our sitting/dining room is at the back, on the North side of the house, with a conservatory further blocking light - so it's pretty gloomy. Not aided by the previous tenant painting it brown, to match the dark wood floor and stairs, and the pre-existing gloom! So it can feel pretty dark - making getting photos in here pretty hard without a flash. Take a look at this picture of Midget Gem playing to see what I mean; this is with the lights on and no flash, late morning, on our sofa!

So that's what we have to play with - and if I want to get photos of the kids inside I need to use my flash, which is okay apart from it bleaching the colours from them. Apart from their eyes. Which look great.

Much as I love those three photos - and much as I'm pleased I got my proper camera out of the bag and used that rather than my phone - they aren't natural light, which was the project for the week. The only place there's any decent light is the windowsill of the kitchen or our bedroom. Our bedroom has a terrible damp problem at the moment (we're waiting for the landlord to respond; the bad weather has caused the damp to go insane, water running down the wall, mould everywhere, I'm cleaning it daily but it grows back just as fast) so I opted to take photos of things in the kitchen window. This is one of my favourite parts of my house anyway, because of the pretty paper birds that hang there and the plants that line the sill. I love macro and close up pictures, so you'll see a lot of those in the project as the weeks go by, and here are some where I've attempted to do my own focus, playing with things in the window in natural light, so you can see the truth of the colour of things.

I love those paper birds SO MUCH. Their colours are fading slowly in the light, but I think that kind of adds to their beauty. They make me smile every single day. I also tried to get some pictures of my Christmas poinsettia (AKA the best plant of all time, I love them HARD, my family kill mine every year, Daddytwo sabotages them deliberately) and this is the best one but isn't what I was trying to do - this was the first one I got half by accident getting ready to take the others - I wanted one from above with the very centre the focus, but they all came out terribly blurry (that was my focussing myself experiment; hindered massively by my terrible eyesight) but I like the dusty leaves and faded glory of this!

So that is my 'better photo project' for the week - natural light really, truly does make things look better, and I need to try and improve the light in our lounge, and get the kids outside more for a; better photos and b; sanity. To see what the other people taking part snapped click the button below.